Difficulties of Using the Roman Alphabet With English
The main difficulty of using the Roman Alphabet with English is that it is only semi-phonetic. English has more speech sounds than letters to express them. Several adjustments which have been made are insufficient to solve the problems. For example two letters, each of which express their own separate sound are used together to express a third sound; for example "sh" as in "she".
There are many silent letters used in traditionally written English which not only confuse but use up energy and space in writing or typing. There are misleading letters such as the combination "ph" for the sound "f" in "phone". There are duplicates of letters, already in the alphabet expressed by another letter or letter combination.
There are numerous double letters where only one of the letters is actually expressed.
In addition, some letters express more than one sound, especially vowels. For example the letter "e" uses one sound for "e" in "every" and another for the "e" in "each". The letter "a" is used for "aim", "am", "father" and "all".
Consider the confusion the simple word "cat" could bring to a child learning to read. The "c" is often used as in the word "city" to represent the sound of "s", but also to represent "k" as in "cup". So the word "cat" has two variables for the letter "c" or even more, and the "a" has at least four variables, total six sounds from which the beginner must choose.
Frequently Roman letters vary their pronunciations of the same letter. An example of this is in the use of "o" in the following words: "comb", "come", "comet", "cork".
Is there any wonder that children of English speaking background take longer to learn to read than some of the children of Europe?